Friday, January 16, 2009

Presidential Candidates for the AMS elections

So the candidates I know of so far running for AMS president are Blake Frederick, Paul Korczyk, and Alex Monegro. I'm sure many of you will be invited to join their facebook groups soon- I have so far managed to avoid the onslaught, but we'll see what happens over the next few days. After all, it was the first day of campaigning, so I'm sure things will heat up soon. I regrettably missed the debates, never having actually heard that they were happening (my bad, I suppose, although I don't know if it speaks to how little advertisement there is of the elections on campus so far), but I will be trying to make it to future debates and actually post what platforms and other such important things are. Although if last year's election taught us anything, it's that the number of facebook friends one has may reflect (or at least be correlated to) how well one does in the election. We'll see. I think correlational analysis might be worthwhile, complete with 95% confidence intervals and all that jazz.

In the meantime, I have googled the candidates, and here's what I came up with:

Paul Korczyk.
-Apart from having a cool Eastern European last name (for which one does get bonus points from me), he seems to appear on the UBC Faculty & Administrative Directory, and is listed as being in the Department of Housing and Conferences.
-He also appears to play hockey. I would like to see some of his hockey skills in action in the election. Throw in some hockey jargon, and it might make for some entertaining debates.

Alex Monegro.
-From his AMS autobiographical statement, it seems like he's a business student who does some psychology.
-He chairs the Fundraising and Sponsorship Committee in the AMS.
-I couldn't find anything else un-AMS related about him. This is sad-making.

Blake Frederick.
-the first google hit mentions him as having been born in Louisiana on May 26, 1978 to Davis and Willie Frede. Me thinks this is the wrong Blake. My search had to be refined.
-Modified hits yielded that he blogs for the UBC Insiders (although not currently, as that would be against some sort of code in some sort of book that none of us read. Except for some, who like to quote it :P
-He has been on Senate. And the BoG. And other positions involving the AMS.

In any case, in the next few weeks I'll be trying to contact them and get some answers to some questions. So be prepared.

As a side note- have we ever had any female presidents? I seem to recall seeing a photo of AMS presidents, and I was overwhelmed by the fact that they were all white males. Thoughts?